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The New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the role that the church has played in sustaining protest movements—and whether effective political dissent in the United States is possible without involvement from religious institutions. They talk about how churches have historically provided moral authority, infrastructure, and community to movements for social change, why those qualities have been difficult to replicate in the age of social media and mass protest, and what is lost when dissent becomes sporadic or primarily digital. They also examine whether churches still have the widespread credibility and organizing capacity to anchor protest today, and what it would take for religious institutions to once again embrace a central place in modern political life.

This week’s reading:

“Can American Churches Lead a Protest Movement Under Trump?,” by Jay Caspian Kang

“Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News,” by Clare Malone

“An Unhappy Anniversary: Trump’s Year in Office,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

“The Overlooked Deaths of the Attack on Venezuela,” by Oriana van Praag

“Why Trump Supports Protesters in Tehran but Not in Minneapolis,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

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To start the new year, New Yorker writers have been looking back on the past one, sifting through the vast number of books they encountered in 2025 to identify the experiences that stood out. This is the fourth—and final—installment in a series of their recommendations. (Here are the first, second, and third editions.) But should you wish to add more books to your pile, you can always consult the magazine’s annual list of the year’s best titles.

Suddenly Something Clicked

by Walter Murch

Amazon | Bookshop

If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, fewer than a half-dozen people have ever held “the whole equation of pictures in their heads,” one of them must be Walter Murch, the eighty-two-year-old editorial wizard who worked on the “Godfather” films, “Apocalypse Now,” “The Conversation,” and a dozen other masterpieces. Murch’s new book, “Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design,” may take you weeks to read, as you stop to look at the movies that Murch dissects with meticulous verve. You will, for example, want to rewatch the scene of Don Corleone’s funeral, filmed at Calvary Cemetery, in Queens, once you learn that the background traffic noise was recorded at 3 A.M. on a Highway 101 overpass in the Hollywood Hills. The sound, Murch writes, was “lonely, with something strangely spiritual about it, like shimmering violins, or, sometimes, buzzing bees.”

You may end up watching all of “The Conversation” in the wake of Murch’s tour-de-force account of its editing process. Francis Ford Coppola had not yet shot the entire script when he went off to make “The Godfather: Part II,” and it fell to Murch to fashion a coherent story from the extant footage. He compares the challenge to playing Tetris: it’s a matter of moving blocks around until a credible through line emerges. What elevates the film into the stratosphere, though, is Murch’s symphonic manipulation of music, sound, and noise. He studied the musique-concrète experiments of Pierre Henry, and adapted them so persuasively for narrative cinema that viewers seldom register how radical his methods really are.

More than a raconteur, Murch is a cinematic philosopher who frames technical issues in terms that get at the nature of perception. What does it mean, he asks, that we used to spend half our viewing time in pitch blackness—adding up all the moments that the shutter on the projector blocked the light? What does it mean that we now see films in unrelenting daylight? “Has some mysterious edge been lost that engaged the imagination of the audience at the primal level?” Yet Murch is no Luddite: in the nineteen-nineties, he was quick to embrace digital technology, and he is now warily open to the possibilities of A.I. “You can’t control the weather during a revolution,” he writes. With a mind as sharp as his, you can, at least, keep pace.—Alex Ross

Kaspar

by Diane Obomsawin, translated from the French by Helge Dascher

Amazon

We writers are constantly bemoaning the death of reading. No one has the attention span for long stories! No one absorbs text the old-fashioned way anymore! Yet of all the books I read in 2025, my favorite was “Kaspar,” by Diane Obomsawin, a slender graphic novel of few words and simple grayscale drawings, that was published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2009.

This is Obomsawin’s take on Kaspar Hauser, a nineteenth-century German man who claimed to have grown up in a dark cellar, without any human contact. We meet him as a Gumby-like figure, asleep on a dirt floor, with only a jug of water and a toy horse. He has no idea how he got there. When he’s around seventeen years old, Kaspar meets his captor, rendered in the book as a shadowy, hatch-marked father: “The Man in Black.” The man teaches him to write his name; he teaches him to take a few fumbling goose steps outside. Kaspar has never before stood up or seen celestial light. The man drops him off in the middle of Nuremberg, with a note addressed to a captain in the local squadron, promising him to the military corps.

It takes a while for the world to figure out who, or what, Kaspar is. “He’s a madman! An imbecile! A half-savage! An impostor!” policemen guess, before locking him up. He becomes a curiosity. He gets passed from one custodian to another, including scientists and aristocrats, all around Europe. He falls in love with nature, and paints sought-after watercolors of flowers and fruit. (One of his paintings is reproduced in the book.) “The day I see red apples,” Kaspar says, “I feel true satisfaction.” Obomsawin pulls from the historical record to create a distilled tragedy, and the result is an unforgettable little novel.—E. Tammy Kim

Absolutely and Forever

by Rose Tremain

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Rose Tremain’s slim, beautiful 2023 novel, “Absolutely and Forever” may be the book I’ve had the most success recommending to others in recent years: my husband, my daughter-in-law, my novelist friend who doesn’t always like what I like—all ate it up. Now it’s your turn, dear New Yorker readers. Tremain’s novel of youthful romantic obsession and painful growing up reminded me in its comic astringency of Muriel Spark, and, in its respect for the roiling emotions of one’s teens and twenties, of Sally Rooney. And because it deals with love and sex in nineteen-sixties England, telescoping enormous cultural changes into a small story that contains surprising depths and a heart-wrenching twist, it also made be think of Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach” and Julian Barnes’s “The Sense of an Ending.”

Our narrator, Marianne, is fifteen when we meet her, a boarding-school girl in love with a vaguely arty boy named Simon, with “a dark flop of hair over his forehead.” Her mother tells Marianne that no one falls in love at her age—she has simply “manufactured a little crush.” It turns out to be more than that, and to resound long after she and Simon no longer see each other, when she has confected a new life in Swinging London (where the young women on King’s Road have “mighty” hair and “tiny little slanty boxes for skirts”), slept with other men and married a good one, grown close to her more grounded and intellectual friend Petronella, worked in a department store and as an assistant to an advice columnist. Likably incompetent and slightly stunned though she is, Marianne seems destined to become a writer—presumably, the writer Rose Tremain. That Tremain, who is now in her eighties and the author of many esteemed novels, could summon up the world of her youth—of youth in general—with such tender, precise affection strikes me as a small miracle.—Margaret Talbot

After the Revolution

by Amy Herzog

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Lately, I’ve found myself turning to plays. The spaciousness of the form is appealing, as is the total focus it commands: everything can turn on a silence, an interruption, the slightest cue. (Not that there can’t be chaos on the page, too; I loved Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves,” which perfectly captures the dizzying warm-up chatter of a high-school girls’ soccer team.) Also, plays are short, and I have a small child; when I have time to read, I want full immersion. Recently, I read Amy Herzog’s “After the Revolution,” from 2010, about a family forced to confront its own wobbly mythology. Set in 1999— “Clinton is a big-business president, the poor are getting poorer, racial divides are deepening, we’re dropping bombs in the Balkans, and people are complacent,” a member of the middle generation says, in a paternally baroque toast—the play turns around Emma Joseph, a recent law-school graduate and civil-rights activist, who discovers that her late grandfather, Joe, a committed “ideological communist” lauded for his silence during the McCarthy era, was politically compromised. (“After the Revolution” may have been inspired by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.) As one might imagine, the members of the Joseph family have different perspectives on the gravity of this transgression. Rich, classic conflicts—between structure and agency; history and mythology; truth and protection, parentally speaking—emerge through intergenerational banter that made me laugh out loud in public spaces. Fine behavior in a theatre; stranger on the subway. A wonderful text for holidays spent around relatives with whom you cannot discuss politics—or, perhaps more riskily, around those with whom you can.—Anna Wiener

Palo Alto

by Malcolm Harris

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If you want to understand the background to the A.I. wave—a wave that might crash the American economy or the human species or, I suppose, somehow make us all rich and happy—then “Palo Alto” is a very good place to start. It’s an account of capitalism through the lens of this one town, beginning with the gold-rush era, and it is angry and incisive in equal measure. In Harris’s telling, Stanford’s Herbert Hoover is not the failure we remember him as but the architect of our present, where tech barons dominate the government that in a rational world might regulate them. The conservatism that Hoover represented meshed with a Stanfordian commitment to selecting the best and brightest, and they combined to produce the hothouse atmosphere that is Silicon Valley. Harris’s book is very long, and in some ways not exactly helpful—the alternative to billionaire-based capitalism he can imagine involves the various Maoist movements that bombed lots of stuff in the Bay Area during the sixties and seventies—but it sets the events of our time in a context that allows you to understand figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman as part of a deep, insidious tradition.—Bill McKibben

At a gathering of the Lost Lambs, a Christian guidance club that meets every Monday and Friday at Our Lady of Suffering Church, the facilitator, Miss Priscilla Winkle, announces, “We are going to try something new today”—a writing exercise in which each member of the group is tasked with inventing an imaginary world. One of the attendees is Bud Flynn, the patriarch of the fracturing family at the center of Madeline Cash’s exhilarating comic novel, whose title, “Lost Lambs,” is both a nod to the fictional support group and an accurate description of Cash’s wayward characters. Nearly all of them have complexes about youth: either they dwell on it as they flail through midlife crises or else they are presently ensnared by its many tortures and joys.

By the time the meeting rolls around, nearly halfway into the novel, Miss Winkle is having an affair with Bud, who’s been sleeping for the past month in a minivan. Meanwhile, his perilously insecure wife, Catherine, embarks on a fling with their most insufferable neighbor. All this tumult has added to the unruly behavior exhibited by the three delinquent Flynn daughters, ages twelve, fifteen, and seventeen. The exercise provides a chance for Bud and a few other members of Cash’s struggling flock to sit quietly in a circle, reflect, and create something new.

Cash, a first-time novelist still in her twenties, is also trying something new. The book is set in an unnamed American suburb somewhere on the West Coast which is stripped of actually existing cultural, political, or historical markers. In their place, Cash has substituted a constellation of witty concepts that fall somewhere between a creative branding exercise and a Christopher Guest-like parody of small-town dysfunction. Some schoolgirls compete in Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant, while their more rebellious counterparts are shipped off to Saint Peter’s Nature and Wilderness Retreat for a bit of mandated reformation. Local stores include “a nineteenth-century-themed British pub called Olive or Twist” and a restaurant named Lucky Penne, and many townspeople are fond of a show called “Dad University,” in which a son and his estranged father are assigned as college roommates.

There are whispers in all this of Pynchon’s California surreal, of Doc Sportello, “Inherent Vice” ’s shaggy stoner detective, lighting a joint and tuning into “Godzilligan’s Island” on the All-Nite Freaky Features program. In interviews, Cash has cited the “systems novel” as an influence, and has described “Lost Lambs” as aspiring to be “The Corrections meets Eyes Wide Shut.” The book does feature suburban family malaise, and a masked party where the vibes are off, but its frenetic pace and undisguised artifice are more reminiscent of madcap detective fiction. (In an interview with The Drift, Cash mentioned reading mid-century noirs “to learn how to plot a mystery; alongside “Inherent Vice,” the book brought to mind the wonderfully zany West Coast detective novels of Ross MacDonald.) Cash’s novel, like those of her literary forebears, doesn’t preach, but it does seem determined to convey the fun of formulating one’s own stories, however fanciful, and sharing them with the group.

Each chapter of “Lost Lambs” is told in third person from the perspective of one of the novel’s characters—usually Bud, Catherine, or one of their daughters, who are Cash’s most intriguing creations. The Flynn sisters attend the Sacred Daughters Preparatory School, and lately the town priest has noted their unwillingness to volunteer for church events. Over the course of the novel, each Flynn girl is suspended from school at least once for some screwball infraction, including spreading conspiratorial theories about covert surveillance operations in town, punching another kid in the face, and preparing to commit an act of domestic terrorism. The girls talk back, stay out late, and hold their breath until they pass out. They are the natural enemy of the variously overbearing, irresponsible, deferential, and wicked adults who populate the novel.

Abigail, the eldest, is “unquestionably pretty enough to be a recurring character on a Christian soap opera,” often lovesick, and dating a former “special contract mercenary” whose nickname is War Crimes Wes. Louise, the one everyone ignores, is not especially anything—except head over heels for her mysterious internet boyfriend, whom she met in a chat room for middle children and who’s awfully well versed in the chemical composition of homemade explosives. But Harper, the youngest, is the most fully and thrillingly realized. She’s brilliant in seemingly all subjects, and has no boundaries (she reads all her siblings’ and parents’ search histories) or respect for authority, but, in the tradition of many a precocious fictional child before her, comports herself with an apparent sophistication well beyond her years.

Cash is adept at playing around with figures we’ve seen before: the corrupt priest, the depressed dad, the pill-popping bestie. Like the other characters in the book, Harper is a stock figure, the brainiac child, but her fearlessness in the face of a crumbling, dishonest world reinvigorates the type. Toward the beginning of the novel, she correctly sniffs out a trafficking plot perpetrated by the company that runs the private port her dad works at (though her concerns are initially ignored). The company is run by an evil tech billionaire, Paul Alabaster, whose greedy tech-billionaire antics (drinking the blood of young Eastern European women in the hopes of staving off old age) represent the extreme end of the spectrum for adults freaking out over their faded youth, and provide acceptable B-plot material, playing backup to the Flynn family breakdown.

Cash’s first book, a short-story collection called “Earth Angel,” was published by the indie press CLASH Books in 2023. (She also co-founded and, until recently, edited the alt-lit journal Forever Magazine.) Most of its seventeen stories feature young female protagonists caught somewhere between attending high school and turning thirty. One dates a guy who likes to kill squirrels; another meets a creepy older man who admires the outfit she wears to school. (“You like [BAND]?” he asked me. I looked down at my shirt and said, “yeah” and he said, “fuck yeah.”) There are deadening moments when Cash doesn’t lift a finger to transform the numbed-out terrors of doomscrolling: “I’m twenty-four and everyone on Instagram has been sexually assaulted and I’m allowed to roll my skirt up as short as I want now because of #metoo and because there is no God and Trump’s railing Adderall.” But Cash’s most original and engaging writing is slightly out of step with reality and bleakly funny, devoted to wordplay and willing to be foolish about it. “The office is purgatory and I’m doing limbo in limbo,” says the narrator of the story “TGIF,” an assistant who’s terrible at her job. “How low can I go?”

Cash paints the alternate world of “Lost Lambs” in vivid, breezy prose alight with casual wit. Describing the wilderness retreat for troubled girls which Harper attends, Cash writes, “One by one the girls grew tired and docile, their spirits broken. Their nose rings healed. They learned to fish.” The shell of the story is predictable, synthetic, but this means that you can play with it a lot before it breaks. Each member of the Flynn family is given demons to fight, and each has their own farcical plotline that leads them through crisis to a relatively happy outcome. Everyone’s metaphorical nose ring heals. The case is cracked, but justice was never the point. The point was to create the conditions for a bunch of weirdos to sit around and ask questions of one another.

Cash’s dialogue is the novel’s greatest trick. It’s blunt, even a little wooden, yet she wields it with a quicksilver touch, creating volleys of unblinking banter that read like a mashup of a twisted after-school special with the existential musings of a Hal Hartley film: sometimes brutal, sometimes winning, and—like the paddle bearing the insignia “Holy Sisters’ Paddleball Champion” that hangs on the wall of Mother Superior’s office at the girls’ school and is rumored to be used for beatings—not just for show. Take the scene in which Father Andrew, the town priest, reluctantly helps Louise sign up for the Inner Beauty Pageant. He asks for her name, age, height, religious affiliation, biography, and dream. “I have this one where I’m on fire, burning alive from self-immolation right in the middle of English class,” replies Louise, “and everyone just keeps going about their business, not paying attention to me, no one stops, they just keep doing their worksheets while I’m burning.” Father Andrew responds, “Sorry, more like your aspirations for the future.” “Oh! To win the Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant.”

For all the dialogue’s sharpness, a few narrative strands are left too loose or frayed. As with the acceptable but underwhelming billionaire B plot, the book doesn’t always seem to know quite how seriously to take itself. One moment, Paul Alabaster is threatening the Flynn family’s livelihood, and even the physical safety of the Flynn daughters; the next he’s a harmless chew toy, speaking to Bud in banalities: “The truth is funny! You must try navigating harsh realities with humor.” Yet what scans as authorial laxity here is elsewhere integral to the novel’s charm. Though “Lost Lambs” spotlights the perspectives of adults and children alike, its essential narrative voice is that of a wry, well-loved child who can observe the world on her own terms, and has not yet been too seriously knocked back by it. Channelling this voice allows for the sort of gutsy, big-hearted romp that’s unusual even for a first-time novelist. (The more of them I read, the more it seems that all caustically cynical débuts are alike.) Money, power, and corruption are miniaturized to the same scale as talent contests, school uniforms, and young love, suggesting that Cash’s comic chops tend toward absurdity rather than satire. As Harper sneaks into the Alabaster Manor with the hopes of foiling the tech billionaire’s diabolical plot, she still finds a moment to perform a card trick and deliver a well-timed punch line. The novel’s more sophisticated critiques aren’t of unbridled corporate greed or the über-wealthy, but of ordinary people who have lost the ability to reimagine their lives, stuck as they are in bad marriages, pointless jobs, and crippling regret.

Inside the Flynn family domain, the distinction between responsible adult and dependent child has come undone. The pantry is bare and the house is in shambles. “Clothing was discarded, piled, and abandoned: school uniforms—saddle shoes, pleated skirts, pinafores, cardigans—mouth guards, berets, soccer cleats, kerchiefs from summer camps, and capes from school plays.” The kids are growing up fast, and their mother, Catherine, is trying to recapture her lost youth. She’d only recently completed her undergraduate photography studies when she met Bud, who was in a rock band. The couple settled down almost immediately and started their family, abandoning their artistic pursuits. “Selling out was better for the babies,” Cash writes. “Babies loved sheep.” But at the start of the novel, nearly two decades into Catherine and Bud’s marriage, her old urges surface again in the form of manic delusion, and she starts hanging scantily clothed portraits of herself around the already cluttered house. The Flynns’ pompous neighbor, Jim Doherty, a divorcé with a withdrawn, unpleasant son, encourages Catherine’s artistic rebirth. He’s a creative hack himself, but guarded about it. (He keeps his opus, a series of ceramic vaginas, squirrelled away in his basement.) Catherine is tender, batty, and susceptible to flattery, all qualities that make her fall for Jim, even though he’s got a yard sign that says “An Honor Student Lives Here.”

At the other end of the self-expression spectrum is Harper, who has only ever honored her insatiable appetite for knowledge. Her enthusiasm for connection and her earnest (but never self-congratulatory) search for truth seem to seep into the foundations of the novel, which is ultimately a hopeful tale of family transformation. Harper is bored at school, so Bud suggests that she teach herself Latin. “Soon she could write real Latin in pig Latin, which she scrawled liberally on the kitchen wallpaper.” Then Harper learns enough Russian to acquire an endangered glowworm from some people she meets in a Russian horticultural chat room. “She studied at night by the light of her glowworm,” Cash writes, “Language barriers were a problem that needed solving. Then Harper had a thought: What if everything was a language? The world opened up. Music, computers, electrical currents, braiding—the lingua franca of hair, the phonics of string—it was all just a matter of communication.”

This passage is a wonderful encapsulation of childhood curiosity, the rush that comes with discovering clues to existence everywhere around you, invisible sources in the air. It could also be a description of writing fiction, at least the sort on display in “Lost Lambs,” in which stock characters are seen askew and reënchanted. With her energetic prose and restless imagination, Cash does one better than survey the world; she reinvents it. ♦

Loving County, in northwest Texas, may have the highest trouble-to-resident ratio in the United States. With sixty-four inhabitants, as of the 2020 census, the county is the least populated in the country. Control of its top elected positions—sheriff, judge, constable, county clerk—can be swung by a handful of votes. Many of those vying for power are related to, and estranged from, their opponents. Election results are regularly challenged by the losing candidate, sometimes repeatedly; this past November, Loving County reran three races from its 2022 elections.

Driving the long, empty roads that lead to the county seat, Mentone, an outsider might wonder what all the fighting is for. This part of the state is mostly scrubland, alternately windswept and sunbaked. Roy Orbison spent part of his childhood in Wink, a city close by, and got out as quickly as he could. “There was a lot of loneliness in West Texas where I grew up,” Orbison told an interviewer. “We used to say it was the center of everything, five hundred miles from anything.” He once said, “It was tough as could be, but no illusions, you know? No mysteries in Wink.” The area is known for brutal heat with little relief; a town just up the road is called, aptly, Notrees. But Mentone is situated near the center of the Permian Basin, the nation’s most productive oil-and-gas field. As many as fifteen thousand oil-and-gas workers pass through the county daily, and the industry has made Loving County one of Texas’s richest jurisdictions per capita, thanks in part to the fracking boom. Tax revenue amounts to roughly a million dollars per resident, and the county budget has more than doubled since 2020. Many county jobs, including paramedic, maintenance technician, and clerk, come with six-figure salaries.

Yet Mentone has no church, grocery store, cemetery, or school. What it does have is a legacy of enmity stretching back decades. In the twentieth century, several families—the Hoppers, the Creagers, the Joneses—competed for control of the town. When Pamela Colloff surveyed the county’s “spiteful, tribal politics” for Texas Monthly, in the mid-nineties, she found elections that were “knock-down-drag-out fights” animated by “the tangled web of family rivalries, personal vendettas, and enduring grudges among locals.” Some of those clans have since dwindled or decamped for more populated areas. But the habit of feuding remains, though these days it’s largely confined to infighting between factions of the Jones family. “If we had a movie theatre, or a mall, or five thousand people, or even one thousand people, things would be radically different,” Steve Simonsen, the county attorney, told me. “There’s not anything else to occupy people.”

The most recent spate of drama ignited in 2021, after Skeet Jones, the county judge, reported that five cows had been found shot dead by the side of the road. A “confidential informant” from “the inner circle of the Jones family” helped an investigator specializing in livestock crimes, who came to believe that the judge was rounding up stray cattle and selling them at auction, according to a criminal complaint. Skeet said that his sales of strays had the blessing of the sheriff, and that the proceeds were given to charity. (The sheriff at the time denied making this arrangement.) The mystery of the dead cows was never solved, but Skeet and three other men were arrested for cattle rustling. (The charges have since been dismissed.) A few days later, after Skeet’s son showed up for jury duty, he was put in handcuffs. He and three others were arrested for contempt; according to Amber King, the justice of the peace, they falsely claimed residency in the county while actually living elsewhere. (These cases have also been dismissed.)

The incidents made visible the growing schism between Skeet Jones and his nephew, Brandon Jones, the county constable. Skeet’s faction maintains that they have been the subjects of political persecution. Brandon—who is widely suspected of being the livestock investigator’s confidential informant—has argued that his uncle runs the town as though he’s above the law. (Brandon declined to comment on the identity of the informant.) Both sides have filed a flurry of lawsuits and countersuits naming each other. (The filings, with their absurdly heightened rhetoric, can make for odd reading. In an application for a temporary restraining order and injunction against Brandon, one of Skeet’s allies claimed, among other things, that Brandon raised his eyebrows “in an intimidating manner” during a proceeding.)

Elections have become proxy battles in the family war, with each side furnishing candidates for local offices. (Loving County is, on the whole, a deeply conservative place, but a number of its elected officials—including Skeet—run as Democrats, as if the political realignments of the past seventy years had bypassed the county while its residents were consumed by more local concerns.) “Any voter can challenge the registration of any other voter, and, in Loving County, just about every vote we have has some kind of civil challenge,” David Landersman, the county sheriff, said. He also serves as the county’s voter registrar.

The feud in Loving County is marked by both intensity and stasis, with the two sides locked in a small-town version of trench warfare. One recent election was won by a single vote; another resulted in a tie. Then, in 2024, a third element entered the system, in the unlikely form of a hustle-culture evangelist from Indiana named Malcolm Tanner.

In 2023, Teresa, a woman living in South Carolina, was driving a snaking road down a mountain when a word popped into her head: “Texas.” Two years later, it happened again. This time, the word was “West.” Shortly afterward, she saw a social-media post by Tanner, a tall and confident self-proclaimed C.E.O. and real-estate mogul. Tanner spoke in a blend of political rabble-rousing and entrepreneurial uplift. He urged his three hundred thousand Facebook followers to head to a place that Teresa was hearing about for the first time: Loving County. “See you in Texas soon,” he wrote in a post. “Thank you all for saying YES to finding a true political home with us!”

Owing to its wealth, the county had caught the attention of political interlopers in the past. In 2005, a handful of libertarians attempted, with little success, to wrest control of the government. The idea of taking over the county occasionally circulates on X and YouTube as “the craziest deal in America.”

Tanner had pitched a number of grand visions in recent years. He was going to develop a dilapidated former Y.M.C.A. building in central Indiana into a hotel; he was going to host a Million Man March, also in Indiana; he was going to run for President and institute reparations for what he referred to as “melanated people.” None of his schemes panned out. Then, in 2024, he turned his attention to Loving County. Tanner’s followers could move to Texas, win elected positions, and receive “free political homes,” he claimed. (He also suggested a new name: Tanner County.) On Clubhouse, the live voice-chat platform, he hosted raucous, engaging meetings twice a day. “I retired, I was bored, and it was just something to do. I was meeting a lot of people, you know, melanated people from all over the world—good people,” Erica Marshall, a former member of Tanner’s circle who has become one of his most vocal critics, told me. Tanner was “very manipulative,” she said. “He’s managed to have people quit their jobs, leave their homes. They sold all of their things except the stuff that they could fit in their car, and they went to Loving County, just like that.” (Marshall never made it to Texas.)

In October, I drove to Mentone. It was my first time in Loving County and, given all I’d heard about the sparse population, I was expecting tumbleweeds and eerie Panhandle silence. But the town was bustling, the roads full of pickup trucks and heavy equipment; at the gas station, I had to wait in line for a pump, as oil workers commuted to and from work.

There’s no traditional hotel in Mentone; instead, I stayed the night in a man camp, a kind of oil-field version of an all-inclusive resort, complete with a cafeteria, a gym, and multiple game rooms. The next morning, I attended a proceeding for one of the ongoing Jones v. Jones lawsuits. In this instance, Brandon’s wife and father—Skeet’s brother—faced allegations including conspiracy and fraud stemming from the dead-cattle investigation. (They have denied the charges.) Around a dozen representatives from the two factions sat on opposite sides of the small, pecan-wood-panelled courtroom. The judge wore a bolo tie, and, after listening to brief opening statements, offered to recuse himself; when he was a prosecutor, he’d discussed a related case with the livestock-crimes investigator. Afterward, Skeet declined to comment, while some of the women sitting on his side of the courtroom chatted me up with tactical friendliness. (Residents have become good at identifying journalists in their midst; the county’s drama has been covered by the Times, Rolling Stone, and NBC, among others.) Outside, Brandon caught up with me. He said that he didn’t feel safe speaking at the courthouse, where both he and his uncle work, and asked to meet on the outskirts of town.

Small towns in Texas once operated like patriarchal fiefs, with a singular figure dominating local business, politics, and real estate; the town or county may have even shared a name with his family. (The nation got a taste of this big-man style of governing via Lyndon Johnson, who grew up in Johnson City, Texas.) In Loving County, Skeet’s critics maintain, the practice is ongoing. Skeet, who is in his seventies, has been the judge—Loving County’s top position—for eighteen years. (His father, Punk, was the sheriff for nearly three decades.) Skeet is also the majority owner of P&M Jones Family Ranch, a sprawling property and a significant generator of revenue. A number of county employees work for the ranch, live in properties that it owns, or have been sold ranch land for a fraction of its market value. Skeet, a member of a conservative Christian denomination that believes drinking is a sin, enforces an alcohol ban on ranch property. When I asked Simonsen, the county attorney, how it was possible to enforce this kind of informal injunction, he laughed. “I would call it more formal,” he said. “In town, there’s one place to buy alcohol, and everybody talks.” But Simonsen, who is married to Skeet’s cousin, said insinuations that the judge was exerting control by doling out property didn’t add up: “I’ve seen him help get people into houses, or sell people land at a good rate, and they become his political enemies.”

This style of family-power politics reliably produces dissidents and black sheep—in this case, Brandon, a son of Skeet’s younger brother. Tall, devout, and tightly wound, Brandon grew up in neighboring Winkler County before moving to the Fort Worth area, where he worked as a blacksmith. In 2012, he and his wife, Holly, relocated to Loving County, to help care for his father following his mother’s death. After he became constable, in 2017, he attended law-enforcement training, where some things he learned—for instance, that it was strongly frowned upon to hire close friends and family, because of potential conflicts of interest—made him question how Loving County was being run. The more he went against Skeet’s wishes, Brandon said, the more he was frozen out, among relatives and at work. He had the sense that people were talking behind his back; ugly rumors about his family began circulating around town. A whistle-blower lawsuit from a former county employee who is not related to the Jones family alleged that Skeet, his sister (who is the county clerk), and others “would often talk openly in their office about their beliefs that the [King family] and Brandon Jones were evil and discuss how God would rain fire on them and they would pay, and would work on County time to research lawsuits and legal allegations that could be brought against the Kings and Brandon Jones.” (The county settled the whistle-blower lawsuit, but Simonsen rejected the allegations. “I saw that woman every day, and she never once said anything about that to me,” he told me.)

A relative who’d also been ostracized by the family suggested to Brandon that he look into the psychological dynamics of abuse. Soon, he had new terminology to explain what was happening to him: DARVO, gaslighting, love-bombing. “You come out here and people show you kindness, they shower you with gifts—you can’t describe it until you’ve experienced it, and if you try to convince someone of it you look crazy for it,” he told me. “It’s a whole narcissistic abuse cycle that we’re stuck in—and it’s gone on for decades.”

In 2024, the county commissioners—who, according to Brandon, tend to defer to his uncle—voted to cut the constable’s salary from roughly a hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars a year to roughly thirty-one thousand dollars. “Five words—bad behavior and poor performance,” Skeet explained to the Houston Chronicle. The county also elected to halve the salary of the sheriff, who had beaten Skeet’s preferred candidate, and to eliminate two of six deputy positions. (Although Texas recently passed legislation punishing municipalities that defund the police, the law doesn’t apply to jurisdictions as small as Loving County.)

Not long afterward, law enforcement began receiving tips about “a guy doing online posts who says he’s going to come in and take over the government,” according to Landersman, the sheriff. Residents began to notice strange faces popping up in town. “You pretty much know everybody around here,” Caydee Carr, Skeet’s niece, told me. If you do see someone new, she said, “they’re wearing a uniform that says ‘oil field.’ ” The strangers—all of whom were Black, an anomaly in Mentone—were spotted filling up containers of water from spigots on private property. More than a dozen of the newcomers registered to vote.

Meanwhile, Tanner had bought two five-acre properties and announced online that he had “taken over” the county. He posted pictures and videos of smiling people hoisting lumber and framing houses. “Just gave 24 properties away,” he wrote. In August, Teresa put her dogs in her S.U.V. and headed west. She told me that per Tanner’s instructions, she’d already sent him a hundred-dollar monthly donation and registered to vote in Loving County. It took nearly twenty-four hours of driving to reach West Texas. In Mentone, she met a woman who led her even farther out into the middle of nowhere.

What she saw alarmed her. According to law enforcement, the group living at Tanner’s Loving County compound has comprised as many as thirty people, many of them women and children. Most were living in R.V.s or tents. There was no running water or septic system on the property, and the group appeared to be burning trash in a pit. Teresa claims that the meals were largely communal and residents were expected to abide by strict rules: no alcohol, drugs, weapons, or pets. If Teresa wanted to stay, she’d need to drop her dogs off at the local shelter. The R.V.s were all occupied, but she could order a tent and camping supplies on Amazon. “I’m looking around, like, they must’ve lost their cotton-picking minds,” Teresa told me. She went to stay in a motel. She returned twice more to help out with construction, but was even more dismayed; when Tanner crossed her path, he didn’t even introduce himself. (She has since moved to a city in the Permian Basin, and is no longer in contact with the group.)

After a Houston Chronicle story about the Tannerites went viral, last September, Mentone filled up with a different set of strangers: state troopers, investigators from the attorney general’s office, and F.B.I. agents. The state issued an injunction preventing people from living on Tanner’s property, in part owing to the sewage issues. But, when law enforcement went to serve the papers, Tanner was nowhere to be found; there are no signs that he has spent significant time in the county in months, sources told me.

After the injunction, the Tannerites relocated to the other five-acre parcel in Loving County that Tanner owned. (This property, too, is under action by the state.) Some people seemed to hope that the group would soon dissipate of its own accord. “The weather is very, very bad here,” Landersman said. “There’s big winter winds that come through here—that sends people out, even people with houses.” The group has dwindled in size, but, at least so far, some of the newcomers seem determined to stick it out. (Tanner did not respond to requests for comment, and one of his followers declined to be interviewed.)

In December, a video was posted to Tanner’s TikTok account recruiting new people to join the Melanated People of Power movement. A woman’s voice spoke over the sound of a humming generator, describing moving to Loving County as a “voluntary self-funded life-style choice for adults who believe in empowerment, community, and independent living.” The video suggested that prospective residents arrive with two two-hundred-and-seventy-five-gallon water totes, a propane tank, a water pump, and personal-hygiene items. This fall, sources told me, members of the group registered to run for every countywide office up for election in 2026. (Tanner himself is not a candidate; nor has he registered to vote in the county.) Simonsen told me that he was doubtful Skeet’s enemies would go so far as to vote for a stranger over him. “It’s one of those things where ‘I know that devil, but I don’t know the other devil,’ ” he said. But others were less certain. “The Tanners really throw it up in the air. We don’t know what they’re going to do,” Carr, Skeet’s niece, said.

Brandon Jones had little positive to say about Tanner. “I’m afraid that these people who’ve come here with high hopes, he’s going to leave them hanging,” he told me. After Brandon’s water bill was unusually high one month, a rumor started going around town that he was providing the compound with water, which he has denied. (He says that he had a leaking water trough.) But he sympathizes with some of the newcomers. They’ve been attempting to find a new way to live in a place that is hostile beyond just the environment. “They’re trying awful hard,” he said. “They’re sticking their necks out to be here.” ♦